Call Charles Busch a ‘Drag Legend,’ if We Must Use Labels

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/theater/charles-busch-lily-dare.html

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“The stretch gusset: Do we dare?”

Coming from Charles Busch, a connoisseur of Hollywood’s golden age, you might expect this to be some double entendre involving obscure 1940s slang. But he was asking a real question.

Busch was in between rehearsals, trying on a gown he wears as the title character in “The Confession of Lily Dare,” which begins performances on Jan. 11 at the Cherry Lane Theater. The snug fit was restricting his movements, and he would probably need to lift his arms dramatically at some point while portraying an orphaned ingénue who becomes a sultry nightclub entertainer, loses her daughter while locked up in jail, then rebounds as the head of a bordello empire.

This costume, at least, was an improvement on the one Busch donned in an earlier version of the play. “I looked like a sequin-covered sausage,” he said, chuckling.

“Lily Dare” is the latest example of the ripe, zany period romps that have defined and sustained Busch’s reputation since he burst onto the New York theater scene as a writer-performer with the long-running Off Broadway hit “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” in 1984. It’s also his first show in this particular style to open to the press since 2010, when he starred as a guitar-strumming nun in “The Divine Sister.”

Busch, 65, has spent much of the past decade developing a cabaret career; he also premiered two plays — “Olive and the Bitter Herbs” and “The Tribute Artist” — that were less flamboyant that his usual fare and did not make much of a mark.

But far from the critics’ glare he returned to his roots, putting on three-week runs of new plays in his old mode at Theater for the New City, the scrappy East Village institution he has worked with since it presented his drama “Before Our Mother’s Eyes” in 1981.

In that show, Busch said, “I played incestuous identical twin brothers who jump off a bridge and kill themselves.” He continued: “The coup de théâtre in Act II was when I had sex with myself. Totally nude — it’s the avant-garde, darling, you had to be nude. And it was terrible. But we established a relationship, and I keep going back.”

His outings at Theater for the New City found him in peak form, channeling the Tinseltown he so dearly loves in “The Divine Sister” (which went on to a commercial run); the biblical epic “Judith of Bethulia” (2012); the historical pageant “Charles Busch’s Cleopatra” (2016) and “The Confession of Lily Dare” (2018), his homage to weepy pre-Code melodramas of thwarted mother love, which Primary Stages is bringing Off Broadway to the Cherry Lane.

“We did them for the joy of being together and putting on a play, and for Charles’s fans to come and have a good time,” said Carl Andress, who directed “Queen Amarantha” with Busch in 1997 and has since been at the helm of almost all his shows, including “Lily Dare.”

Those plays were staged at Theater for the New City with an old-fashioned approach that feels at odds with much of New York’s theater scene — neither driven by the bottom line nor experimental. Doing a show just for fun: Imagine that!

Then again, he is a loyal man: to institutions like Theater for the New City; to the actors who are fluent in his writing’s cadences; to his collaborators (he has worked with set designer B.T. Whitehill since the mid-1980s); and, of course, to the Hollywood of the studio system — though his plays are immediately accessible even to those who can’t tell Katharine and Audrey Hepburn apart.

“He works with specific references, but his material also works if you don’t know them,” said Jennifer Van Dyck, whose roles in “Lily Dare,” her fifth Busch play, include Lily’s opera-singing daughter, a madam, a doctor’s wife and a police officer going undercover as a baroness. “He’s a storyteller, so you always have plot driving forward. And his language is very dense, very muscular, very rhythmic, very musical.”

Similarly, the characters Busch writes for himself are not impersonations: He tries to get into classic actresses’ heads rather than imitate their speech. After rehearsing a section in which Lily Dare confronts the man who caused her trip to jail, the soft-spoken Busch explained that it was a very Bette Davis style, but he was not doing her. “I’m intellectually approaching the scene, maybe, as she might have approached it,” he said. “I just love these movies so much that I don’t want to make fun of them; I just want to be in them.”

What Busch does in works like “Lily Dare” honors not so much specific performers as aesthetics and themes. “He loves a redemption tale,” said the actress Julie Halston, a friend and collaborator since the 1980s, in a phone interview. “He loves a bad girl who’s going, by the end, to become a more generous spirit. As hokey as it can be, it’s a formula that works because it can be very touching.”

What defines Busch above all is that he doggedly persists in writing full-on comedies built on entertaining, sensational plots packed with zingers. His collaborations with L.A. Theater Works, which records plays for radio, podcasts and online audio streaming, underline his prose’s punch. “Charles’s work is so verbally clever that you focus on that, and you’re getting a huge amount that might pass you by if you’re distracted by the visuals,” Susan Albert Loewenberg, the company’s producing director, said in a telephone interview.

“When we do these radio versions,” Busch said, “I’m usually not in drag, and we do them in front of a live audience. I love costumes and I love spectacle, but I don’t need it, I can play the character without it.” (For the record, he does give an excellent performance in a frock.)

Busch’s only Broadway show as a playwright, the Tony Award-nominated “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” from 2000, is among the most commercially successful plays of the past quarter-century — and yes, it’s a comedy. Less fortunate was his one other Broadway credit: as the book writer for the 2003 Boy George musical “Taboo.”

That show left a deep, painful mark. “It’s up there with the great horrible experiences of my life: my mother’s death, my heart surgery and ‘Taboo,’” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to live. I really thought I was going to have a stroke.”

Happily, he did live. And 35 years into his career, the gentle and shy Busch remains easy to love and hard to pigeonhole. “Everything in my life and who I am, I’m two sides of everything,” he said. “I’m male and female; I’m young, I’m old; I’m downtown, I’m mainstream; I’m the life of the party, I’m a recluse.

“I like to think that I’m ultimately an actor; but you live in the real world and you have to describe yourself, so I’ll be a drag legend. ‘Legend’ makes everything sound good. Anything legend — I’ll take it.”